Conjure Women Page 2
Sarah looked at the child. She did not move to give him her breast. Instead she pulled the dirtied sheets around herself, and when Rue came to press on the stretched skin of her belly to check that nothing had been left in the womb, Sarah would not let her near. She wanted only to stare at her baby, not with that new-mama affection but in the very same way you’d stare at a snake you’d woken up to find coiled beside you in your bed.
“He’s a big ’un,” Rue said, to say something.
“Them eyes?”
“Like little black-eyed beans, ain’t they?” Rue said. She wished she could snap back those words soon as they left her lips. She should have pretended that everything was as it ought to be. Her mama, Miss May Belle, had she been living, might have had the words of reassurance, might have made the baby a miracle, for she had that way about her that Rue had never learned or inherited.
Sarah still would not take the baby up. His crying grew more shrill in the silence, like an accusation, and Rue felt she had to go on talking.
“Folks says babies born under the veil got the gift a’ the Sight,” Rue said. It was meant to be a comfort. It came out sounding grim as a burden. Rue found that she pitied that babe if it were true, for here he was not a clock’s tick old and already he had to bear the whole knowledge of the world.
Rue had stripped the sheets, stepped out of the cabin without saying any more. There was Jonah, the daddy, waiting. He’d been keeping himself busy chopping more firewood than the hot summer day rightly called for, and when he saw Rue step out, he stopped mid-swing and smiled.
She studied him, taking in his sun-darkened skin and his eyes that were the same easy brown as the bark he was cutting. He bore no resemblance to his son. His son bore no resemblance to any living thing she had ever seen.
When Rue stepped forward, the bloodied birthing sheets bundled in her arms, Jonah looked up at her with trepidation. He could not lend voice to the question that needed asking.
Rue spoke to spare him the effort: “You got yo’self a thrivin’ baby boy.”
His sweat-shining face broke out into a grin and before he could ask her anything more, she handed him the bundle of sheets that contained the damning black caul, bloody and shapeless, in its center. She knew even if he got a look at it, he wouldn’t understand it. Men could not make sense of women’s work.
“What do I do with all a’ this?”
“Burn it,” she said, telling him what he was needing to hear. “Burn it for luck.”
SLAVERYTIME
1854
Miss May Belle had used to turn coin on hoodooing. As a slave woman she’d made her name and her money by crafting curses. More profit to be made in curses than in her work mixing healing tinctures. More praise to be found in revenge than in birthing babies.
In slaverytime a white overseer had his whip and a white patrolman had his hounds and a white speculator had his auction block and your white master had your name on a deed of sale somewhere in his House, or so he claimed. But those things were afflictions for the battered-burnt-bruised body only. Curses were for the sin-sick soul and made most terrifying because of it.
“Hoodoo,” Miss May Belle used to say, “is black folks’ currency.”
She had admitted only once, to Rue, in confidence: “The thing about curses is that you can know who you’ve wronged the most by who you fear has the notion to curse you.”
Black neighbors would whisper against black neighbors, sure, but by and by a white man would come from afar having heard of Miss May Belle’s conjure, asking for cure of some affliction set upon him by an insolent slave, or even by his own white wife. Other slavefolk got hired out for their washing, for their carpentering, for their fine greasy cooking. Miss May Belle was hired for her hoodooing.
So it was that Big Sylvia, the cook of the plantation House, came to the slave cabin where Miss May Belle and her daughter lived alone, to ask after a curse.
Rue saw her coming from afar. The diminutive house slave had a crooked walk on bowed little legs, and Rue stood tiptoed in the cabin’s one window, watched as the cook came down the dust road at dusk, determination in her little steps but a look like fear on her face, as she headed to the healing woman’s house. Beyond Big Sylvia, Rue could see from where she’d come. Marse Charles’s white-pillared House blazed big and hazy opposite the setting sun.
“Come away from there, Rue-baby,” Miss May Belle said, and Rue obeyed her mama. “Cook’s comin’ to ask after hoodoo. Now, you know that ain’t nothin’ that a child needs to hear ’bout.”
How Miss May Belle knew before Big Sylvia’s knock what the matter was Rue could not rightly say. But she tucked herself in the corner of their one-room cabin, balled herself small between the stove and the bedpost, and pretended at not listening.
Miss May Belle creaked the door open, allowed their visitor in.
“I ain’t been workin’ in the kitchen for some months now,” Big Sylvia complained. She sat across the supper table from Miss May Belle and held out her right hand. It was bundled up covering a deep cut that some weeks back had near took away her fingers.
Rue’s mama undid the bandages, revealed the hideous slash from finger to wrist. It was deep, angry, and oozing. Big Sylvia’s dark skin and eyes were shining with a fever she couldn’t kick. “It won’t never heal ’cause somebody’s put a fix on me.”
“Who you think done it?”
“Who else? That woman. Airey. She the one that’s took up cookin’ in my place. She’s been schemin’ after it for years tryna get herself a place in the House.”
Fact was that Airey’s mama had been the cook when Marse Charles had been a child, back when the plantation had been all but a few rows of hopeful seedlings. By all accounts Airey’s mama hadn’t been all that good of a cook neither, but there was no taking a white man from his auntie nostalgia. Airey had believed that because of her mama she was owed the kitchen, with a lineage as good as a lordship, but Big Sylvia had been bought special with commendations for her cooking. Airey had taken after her field-hand daddy instead, a sharp beauty but mule-strong, bred with hands for picking.
“Now I’m left to do the washin’, even now I’m one-handed, mind,” Big Sylvia said, “and Airey, she at the oven, got Marse Charles smackin’ his lips after every meal, thinkin’ he gon’ get rid a’ poor ol’ Sylvia, maybe sell me next time the prospector come ’round, keep Airey on.”
Miss May Belle tutted. She shut her eyes as if consorting with herself, let Big Sylvia stand there panting for a long while, working herself up into a deeper fury the more she thought on the unfairness.
“You best be sure now,” Miss May Belle finally said. She rebandaged Big Sylvia’s hand good and tight.
Big Sylvia nodded in earnest. “It was her face I saw when my hand slipped and the knife cut me. Yes, I saw her face plain. She tol’ me I was to die. Now I see her in my sleep every night. She set by the foot of my bed with the devil on her left side stabbin’ at my hand.”
To undo Airey’s magicking Rue’s mama advised that Big Sylvia circle her own bed with a sprinkle of salt, nightly. This Big Sylvia swore to do.
“But, Miss May Belle, how am I to get my place back?”
“You’ll needa take somethin’ a’ hers. A piece a’ her hair like. When you fetch it, come back to me on Friday.”
Big Sylvia repeated her thanks over and over. Her rewrapped hand was thick and clumsy with the new bandaging, and she struggled at the pocket of her apron ’til she produced a silver dollar with the promise of more coin to be had come Friday.
“I’d bring you them good ashcakes a’ mine too, but I can’t cook nothin’.”
Rue watched her mama slip the coin easy into her own pocket.
“We’ll see to it that you back in yo’ rightful place, by the Lord’s grace,” Miss May Belle promised.
Rue knew that her mama, thin a
s she was, did have a love for Sylvia’s ashcakes.
* * *
—
On Sunday her mama picked nits from her daddy’s hair and Rue pretended to be asleep. Half days were for praying and for visiting, the one day that Miss May Belle saw her man. He journeyed from the neighboring plantation, a trip that took him ’til nightfall, and Rue would struggle to stay awake to see her daddy arrive in the doorway and greet her mama. From the bed, Rue strained to watch them, but she could see only their shadows twist and join, stretched out black and big on the dirt floor.
Rue fought off sleep but she did every now and again succumb, and their hushed, soothing voices—her daddy’s as hard as timber, her mama’s as soft as pulp—were sometimes things of her dreams. Her daddy sat on the floor between her mama’s bare thighs, his head pushing up her dress, his lips kissing healed-up grazes on her kneecaps, and her mama sat in the chair above, cussing softly at tangles.
When next Rue jerked herself awake, her daddy had the doll baby in his hand. He was turning it around in his thick fingers. He was displeased; she could tell by the lines etching themselves deep in his forehead.
“It look like her,” he conceded.
Indeed, the doll baby Miss May Belle had made of blackened oilcloth and stuffed with straw, though crude, resembled Airey completely. She’d embroidered a face even, wide-set eyes and a line of red stitching for Airey’s thin, proud mouth. The doll wore spare calico and the type of red kerchief Airey often favored. But the most prominent detail was the mismatched black paint of the legs where Airey was known to have a pattern of birthmarks that freckled in circles black and white up to her thighs, varying smatterings where her skin lacked color, where she seemed almost to be white in unplanned for places great and small. The real live Airey kept the marks hid the great majority of the time, but everybody knew her to be proud on them; she’d hike up her skirt and show them off sometimes in the swirl of her dancing. They were there on the doll hid beneath the blue calico rag dress, beneath the white napkin, an approximation of the kitchen apron Big Sylvia coveted. Miss May Belle had made that miniature live.
“It’s a sinful thing to be messin’ with,” Rue’s daddy warned.
Rue watched her mama pause in her brushing. She kissed the very top of her man’s head, left her lips there when she answered. “I won’t hurt her none.”
Rue’s daddy set the doll down on the floor gentle, like he feared it might start living.
“What is it you mean to buy with all them silver coins?” she heard him ask.
Rue, dozing, might have dreamed the answer her mama gave her daddy: “You.”
* * *
—
Friday came, wicked with rain, and Rue, sent to beg a needle off the seamstress, came back to the cabin wet and cold to find her mama and Big Sylvia, heads bent and conspiring. Beneath the doll’s red kerchief Miss May Belle worked in quick, neat stitches to sew down the tuft of thick black hair Big Sylvia had stolen from Airey’s comb.
“Didn’t hardly think you’d get it,” Miss May Belle said of the hair.
“Weren’t easy. Had to wait ’til Sunday, ’til she’d gone visitin’ that Charlie.”
“They still courtin’?” Miss May Belle asked, though she surely knew—didn’t she know everything?
“They fixin’ to get proper married, iff’n Marse Charles will ’llow for it. And he surely will as he’s like to get from ’em good strong babies.”
Miss May Belle said nothing. Moved or not by talk of sweethearts, she waited patient as Big Sylvia drew two more silver coins from out of her apron pocket. Only then did Miss May Belle hand her the doll.
Big Sylvia’s eyes near gleamed. “What do I do?”
“Scratch off a li’l a’ the black paint from the arms of the doll baby every mornin’. Not too much now, but slowly, and by and by you’ll get what you’re wantin’.”
* * *
—
Rue wished for her own magic and, failing that, wished for coin. She had no use for money, had no sense of what she might or might not buy, but she wanted to feel them, as though the action of slipping her hands across the cool, rare bits of silver, carved with regal fine-boned faces, could elicit a kind of magic in and of itself.
She had been spellbound, at that small age, by the curious mystery of white faces. She saw so few, save the master and his sons, more rarely his wife. Rue was acquainted with only one white face in particular—Varina, Marse Charles’s red-haired, freckle-spotted daughter.
They were both of them six years old, of an age because the master made it so. Varina’s birth was the only clear bright star around which the younger slave children might revolve—you were born after or before the master’s daughter, thereabouts. Rue could hitch her birth in the same season as Varina’s and so they oft played together, kicking up dust in that one precious hour of their mutual freedom, between dusk and candlelight. Varina wasn’t allowed to play at any other time, for the Missus was afeared that her daughter would catch color, spoil away her milk-skim skin.
Rue spent her own days in running favors, not much use in the field or the House and not yet as knowledged as her mama would someday make her. The best use for Rue then was to dash about with a basket, a bucket, or a broom, getting switched on her behind by older folks who complained she was too slow no matter how fast she ran. She was often underfoot. She was often forgotten.
Rue would sometimes look up at the House and spy Varina at the third-story nursery window, knew her for a white figure behind a whiter curtain, looking down. Did she appear wistful? Rue could not truly tell, not from that distance, not with only her hand over her eyes to shade out the midday sun. But it was as though Varina was looking out at her as well, with a sort of wanting, and Rue got to figuring if she ever had magic or money, either, she’d make it so the two of them could play and laugh together in the full sunlight as much as they could stand.
* * *
—
It seemed to Rue that Miss May Belle never had to fetch her coins but could will them into existence, suddenly flipping a flash of silver between her fingers in trade for something or other she was wanting. But where the source was was anybody’s imagining.
Rue watched as her mama slipped her daddy one such coin of a Sunday. She slid it clear across the table over knot holes and scratches and set it in front of her man, who did not take it.
“Nah,” he said.
Miss May Belle was sore. “Why?”
“That’s conjure money.”
“Money is money is money,” she said and he said nothing and the coin gleamed between them.
“Or is it ’cause it’s woman’s money?” Miss May Belle took it back and Rue tried to watch where it went but missed that too, an illusionist’s trick between her mama’s delicate fingers.
* * *
—
Rue looked and looked but she did not find the coins, not in the way she thought she would at least. One day, after the birth of the Airey doll baby that Big Sylvia had bought, Airey herself came to Miss May Belle to ask after a bit of hoodooing. She came upon them at the river where the water was swelled from a season turned rainy before its time.
Rue’s mama said, “I been expecting you to come on round.”
Miss May Belle was not the type interested in making enemies. That was the reason she only advised on how to make a trick, but she never did dispel it with her own two hands. She oft said, The hunter in settin’ his own trap’ll sometimes spring it on himself, which was true, of course—they were forever bandaging up men fool enough to go catching rabbits in the dark of night.
Rue looked over their visitor. Airey was truly pretty, made all of thick bones and fine features, such an amalgamation of two kinds of beauty that she could be admired from one direction and feared from another. But now in person it was clear to see just what Miss May Belle’s magicking had done:
The spangled pattern of white skin that had once been on her legs alone had begun to spread up her arms and to the sides of her neck and along her jaw and nose; a round white swathe sickled around her eye.
If Miss May Belle was shocked by what she’d wrought, she didn’t show it, and Airey for her part didn’t look vengeful. She came to sit by them at the river’s edge, and the reflection of her skin shimmering in the water seemed to make her look like the night sky dotted with stars, beautiful.
“I ill-wished Big Sylvia. I wanted her place in the kitchen,” Airey began. “I been up all night with the regret. I had the notion that life would be easier for me in the House, but it ain’t easier. No, life just ain’t easy nowhere. That’s why I come to see you.”
Miss May Belle shook her head. “No more conjure,” she said. “Y’all settle things between yo’selves. I’ll tell Big Sylvia to be rid of the doll and she’ll do it if I tell her to.”
“Big Sylvia will get her place back I reckon.” Airey held up her hands, and Rue saw that the affliction had taken over her wrists and her knuckles. The thumb of one finger looked as though the black had been sucked clean off the skin. “Missus won’t let me cook her food no longer, won’t let me touch it, thinkin’ this is a sign of some cursedness. Marse Charles’ll listen to her, just to quit her from her naggin’. He’s like to sell me away the next time he’s able.”
“You wantin’ a charm to prevent it?” Miss May Belle asked.
“No’m. I’m wanting a charm to help me run away.”
Miss May Belle looked to Rue beside her and Rue knew the look, the get-gone look. This she was good at, becoming invisible on her mama’s whim. She strode over to where the river started thinning toward the creek and let her mama think that she wasn’t listening.